Sustainable Agriculture Is Certainly Not a Utopia

摘要

The strong manipulative power of fossil fuel ("canned solar energy") applied in farming has led to intensive exploitation and even substitution of nature's goods and services to society in the form of artificial fertilizers, pesticides replacing biological control, and so forth. When, however, the availability of cheap fossil fuel decreases, it will become necessary to restructure agriculture to take full advantage of nature's own contributions. Neglecting the inherent limited capacity of recycling and renewal of the living resources in efforts to gain increasingly higher agricultural yields has led to leakage of valuable nutrients and pesticides into air and water. There is a need for a shift in strategies, where the key is balance between animal production and plant production at the level of farm or village. Local production and consumption are important in order to decrease transportation and thus emissions of greenhouse gases. Over the years there has been much criticism of industrialized agriculture, pointing out the dubious profits when the costs of environmental degradation are included in the analysis.